Anyone who thinks Massachusetts politics has gone soft should take note of the race to become Democratic nominee for secretary of the Commonwealth. It promises to have it all. Drama. Nastiness. Candidates who seem to inhabit different planets. In one corner: incumbent Bill Galvin, an Irish Catholic economic populist who’s known as an insider’s insider. (As a state rep from Brighton, Galvin’s subterranean machinations earned him the nickname “The Prince of Darkness.”) In the other: John Bonifaz, a Harvard Law School graduate, former MacArthur Fellow, and left-leaning activist who founded both the National Voting Rights Institute (dedicated to campaign-finance reform) and AfterDowningStreet.org (dedicated to impeaching President George W. Bush.)

Earlier this month, Galvin and Bonifaz trekked out to Pittsfield, a struggling post-industrial town in the westernmost part of the state, to make their cases to a few hundred Berkshire-area Democratic activists. Bonifaz — who is boyish-looking and slightly built, with a reedy voice — took the microphone first, and launched into a full-throated condemnation of his opponent’s record.

According to Bonifaz, Galvin — whose duties include serving as the state’s chief election officer — has an attitude toward voting-rights issues that borders on criminal negligence. His proof? When the city of Lawrence sent inactive-voter notices to nearly 19,000 residents before last fall’s preliminary municipal election, raising fears that a disproportionate amount of Latino voters might be disfranchised, Galvin “was silent,” Bonifaz said. Around the same time, the federal Department of Justice sued Boston for failing to comply with the Voting Rights Act of 1965 over several election cycles. “The Bush Justice Department shouldn’t be relied on, frankly, to ensure that the jurisdictions in our state are complying,” Bonifaz jibed. Moreover, Galvin dismissed a 2005 study by MassVote — a statewide, nonpartisan voting-rights organization — which charged that bureaucratic glitches may have kept up to 100,000 would-be, eligible voters from casting ballots in the 2004 presidential election. This means wide-scale disfranchisement, Bonifaz told the crowd, and Galvin has turned a blind eye to it.

Next came Bonifaz’s Big Finish. “I wish that were all of it,” he said ominously. “I wish it were just about the secretary being silent. But it’s not. It’s also about the secretary opposing democracy and electoral reform.” Then Bonifaz related Galvin’s last-minute intervention, last year, against legislation to create a trial election-day-registration program in Massachusetts. (EDR, as it’s often called, is favored by activists who believe it would increase civic participation. Galvin says he likes the idea, but that it would need to be implemented uniformly; the trial program would have allowed cities and towns to choose whether to participate.) By the time Bonifaz bolted from the podium, having just panned Galvin as a “go-along, get-along Democrat,” the audience members were ignoring their chicken parmigiana and seemed to be in a state of high excitement. As the applause died down, the emcee offered an approving assessment: “I think we need Democrats who can speak!”

Incumbency After state Senator Dianne Wilkerson’s bizarre failure, earlier this year, to collect enough signatures to get on September’s Democratic primary ballot, an obvious question loomed: did the senator still want her job?

Plogging away When asked about the Internet, most political candidates will dutifully tell you that it’s the wave of the future, or the wave of the present, or the greatest thing since chocolate-chip bagels, or … zzzzzz … wake me when baseball’s post-season starts.

For governor: Deval Patrick Progressive and reform-minded voters have two excellent choices in next week’s Democratic primary for governor: Chris Gabrieli and Deval Patrick.

Who’s with whom For Democratic presidential candidates, Boston is the ATM kiosk on the way to New Hampshire.

Champions of the status quo Although the flameout in April of Matt Brown’s US Senate bid was the most prominent example, he’s hardly been the only Rhode Island candidate to run into a campaign finance-related hassle this year.

Left out When it comes to national politics, New England just ain’t what it used to be. Charting New England: The six states' political stats and facts. By David S. Bernstein

The high hurdles This article originally appeared in the March 24, 1987 issue of the Boston Phoenix.

Advantage: Whitehouse It was just one more in a steady stream of campaign stops, efforts that might land Sheldon Whitehouse six months from now in the most exclusive club in the nation.

How Brown won As the Massachusetts US Senate election unfolded yesterday, all that the pols and pundits wanted to talk about was how Martha Coakley managed to lose the race. And there is plenty there to dissect. But there is another part of the story, and that is how Scott Brown managed to win it.

Deval’s New Hampshire Dilemma Mitt Romney has left Deval Patrick a full raft of problems, from last Friday’s out-of-the-blue unilateral cuts to the state budget to a broken downtown tunnel system people are afraid to drive through.

He said, He saidIn a recent interview with The Phoenix, Glavin said claims that he'd ignored the voting situation in Lawrence last year were patently false: before the election, his office sent a team to Lawrence to train municipal employees and ensure that inactive voters would be allowed to vote when they arrived at the polls on Election Day. Bonifaz's reply to Galvin's rebuttal: "The response has to be, 'Wait a minute, we just sent out notices to nearly half of the electorate, disproportionately affecting Latino voters, suggesting very strongly to them that they might not be able to vote' . . . That's the underlying issue he was silent on."

ARTICLES BY ADAM REILLY

BULLY FOR BU! | March 12, 2010 After six years at the Phoenix , I recently got my first pre-emptive libel threat. It came, most unexpectedly, from an investigative reporter. And beyond the fact that this struck me as a blatant attempt at intimidation, it demonstrated how tricky journalism's new, collaboration-driven future could be.

STOP THE QUINN-SANITY! | March 03, 2010 The year is still young, but when the time comes to look back at 2010's media lowlights, the embarrassing demise of Sally Quinn's Washington Post column, "The Party," will almost certainly rank near the top of the list.

RIGHT CLICK | February 19, 2010 Back in February 2007, a few months after a political neophyte named Deval Patrick cruised to victory in the Massachusetts governor's race with help from a political blog named Blue Mass Group (BMG) — which whipped up pro-Patrick sentiment while aggressively rebutting the governor-to-be's critics — I sized up a recent conservative entry in the local blogosphere.

RANSOM NOTES | February 12, 2010 While reporting from Afghanistan two years ago, David Rohde became, for the second time in his career, an unwilling participant rather than an observer. On October 29, 1995, Rohde had been arrested by Bosnian Serbs. And then in November 2008, Rohde and two Afghan colleagues were en route to an interview with a Taliban commander when they were kidnapped.

POOR RECEPTION | February 08, 2010 The right loves to rant against the "liberal-media elite," but there's one key media sector where the conservative id reigns supreme: talk radio.